About New West

New West is a digital guide to news, analysis, and culture for the Rocky Mountain region. Based in Missoula, Montana, and Boulder, Colorado, the company’s network of writers and editors cover Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico. The award-winning new media publication specializes in stories and ideas about the evolving West. Its focus areas include wildlife, energy, politics, development and the innovators that make the Rockies a frontier for technology and entrepreneurship. New West also documents the literature, photography, film, outdoor recreation and local food movement that define the region’s vibrant culture in the 21st century.

New West comprises:
NewWest.Net, the nationally-award-winning online news source

New West Conferences, live events focused on fostering discussion about the changes in the region

For contact information, head over to our "contact us" page.

Now a little more detail:

New West.Net is a nationally-award-winning, online network covering and connecting the fastest-growing region in the country with a refreshing mix of daily news, original reportage, commentary, photography, video and conversation. You can sign up for daily and weekly newsletters by clicking here, and you can sign up for one of our many RSS feeds by clicking here.

New West Publishing also produces conferences and other live events. For more information on both events go to www.newwest.net/conferences.

There are a number of ways you can participate at NewWest.Net. Anyone is free to share their thoughts on any story via the "comment" button at the bottom of every story. If you have a guest column you'd like to submit for consideration, contact editor Steve Bunk at .

If you're interested in submitting freelance work to New West, click here for our writers' guidelines.

NewWest.Net offers unpaid internships with each of our local sites and with headquarters in Missoula. The deadline for Spring internships is Nov. 1. The deadline for Summer internships is April 15 and the deadline for Fall internships is July 1. If you're interested, send a cover letter, resume and 5-7 clips to (). Electronic portfolios are preferred, but you can also send via mail to P.O. Box 9107, Missoula, MT, 59807.

The New West Team:

NewWest.Net is made up of a community of writers and editors spread out across the Rockies. Here is the core staff at our retreat last summer. Below you'll find a list of the people who run this company.

Lynn Ingham, Publisher and CEO

Lynn is an experienced and professional advertising, publishing and Internet executive with experience in leading national traditional and interactive media sales efforts. Most recently Vice President of Sales for Interactive One, a division of Radio One, Lynn oversaw the sales efforts of the Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles offices.

Lynn is also deeply involved in the San Francisco/Bay Area digital community, as a co-founder, Past President and Chairman of SFBIG (www.sfbig.com). Founded as a networking and educational group dedicated to supporting digital marketing innovation – and also to growing and developing digital media talent in the Bay Area - the group has grown to 1,200 members from the advertising, marketing and media worlds.

Lynn’s Interactive One team incorporated the social networking aspects of BlackPlanet into the company’s larger overall digital strategy. Interactive One produces African American (news, health, beauty, entertainment) content sites and manages the associated sites supporting their radio, television and print media assets. In addition to managing sales, Lynn also assisted with strategy and asset management, creating cross-platform solutions as well as deep, rich integrated advertising through innovative advertising and marketing product development.

Prior to her work with BlackPlanet, Lynn spent seven years at The Ad Age Group. She opened its San Francisco sales office in 1997, in the very early stages of the dot-com “explosion.” As myriad new interactive companies (Yahoo!, Google, eBay) emerged – mostly in her San Francisco territory - Lynn developed a digital sales expertise and ultimately led all online sales efforts as National Online Advertising Director for the Ad Age Group sales staff. A true Bay Area technology buff, she got the bug for emerging media from working at Publish! (IDG), MacUser Magazine and ZDTV (Ziff-Davis) and NewMedia Magazine (HyperMedia Communications).

Lynn is a Montana native and a graduate of the University of Montana School of Journalism in Missoula.

Reach Lynn at

Steve Bunk, Editor

Steve returned to Boise, Idaho, in 2003, after more than two decades as a transient journalist. For six years, he wrote about biological research for The Scientist, based successively in Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. He was a writer in Australia for 15 years, in Sydney, Darwin, Perth, and Hobart. He coauthored a nonfiction best-seller, wrote two travel books, and freelanced for the Australian editions of Time, Playboy, and Geo, among other magazines. He traveled widely, reporting from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, China, and Sri Lanka. Earlier, Steve put in a stultifying year as senior writer in marketing communications at the Boise headquarters of a multinational corporation. Before that, he lived in Athens, Greece, where he wrote for an English-text tourism magazine in the daytime and was night city editor of the English-text newspaper. A frequent contributor to NewWest.Net over the past year, he also is managing editor of Idaho Magazine, and a guy who appreciates what being a father has done for him.

Reach Steve at

Courtney Lowery, Co-founder, editor at large and food and agriculture contributor

Although she cut her journalism teeth in the traditional media (papers and wires) with Lee Newspapers and the Associated Press, starting NewWest.Net with Jonathan Weber in 2005 made Courtney into a reluctant geek. While journalism is still at the heart of all of it, as is turns out, she's a closet coder. Little did she know, her farming background on the barren Montana plains made her pretty good at breaking things and then fixing them -- something that comes in handy when running a built-from-the-ground-up scrappy Web business.

Courtney is also the founder of the Rural News Network project at the University of Montana, which connects UM students with rural Montana while helping small towns revive their newspapers online. Outside of journalism, Courtney consults with newspapers and non-profits on their use of the Web and serves as a board member for the Montana-based AERO, an organization that works on sustainable solutions in energy and agriculture. To really complicate things, she and her husband, Jacob Cowgill, who works as the agriculture liaison for Sen. Jon Tester in Montana, run a small organic farm near Conrad, Mont., where they raise vegetables, heritage turkeys and heritage and ancient grain.

Reach Courtney at

Jenny Shank, Books & Writers Editor

Jenny Shank grew up in Denver and left Colorado only long enough to earn her B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Although her skills as a crack book report writer set off a bidding war among potential employers, she opted to stay in school long enough to earn an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Colorado. She served as the Denver/Boulder A.V. Club Editor of The Onion from 2000 until the 2006 birth of her daughter, and her book reviews appear in the Rocky Mountain News and the Daily Camera. She’s a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer whose work has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, CutBank, Weber Studies, Bust, Image, Calyx, Eureka Literary Magazine, Sport Literate, and other publications, and one of her stories was listed among the “Notable Essays of the Year" in the Best American Essays. Her novel-in-progress was a recent semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. She lives in Boulder with her husband and daughter.

Reach Jenny at

David Frey, Contributor

A native of Pennsylvania, David Frey came to Colorado in 1993 as an intern at High Country News in Paonia and decided he would never leave the Rockies. Then he changed his mind - but only for a while. After two years with the Associated Press in Nashville, Tenn., he bounced back to the Roaring Fork Valley. He has written for newspapers, magazines, the wire and the Web. His work has appeared in the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, the Aspen Daily News and the Snowmass Sun, among other publications. He freelances out of Carbondale, where Mount Sopris watches over his shoulder as he types. He and his wife Janet have two cats, two dogs and two horses. The ark is on the way.

Reach David at